The Kitchen, an early champion of the farm-to-table approach to building a menu, has introduced a new wine list that will thrill people who pepper conversations with words like “sustainable,” “organic” and “biodynamic.”

On March 7, all of the wines in the Boulder restaurant now come from grapes that are farmed “sustainably,” are organic, and are biodynamic, according to a press release.

This is a wee bit confusing. Something grown biodynamically will de facto be grown organically (biodynamic is hyper-organic, and includes planting and harvest guides based on lunar cycles and astrology, and involves, among other things, the use of buried steer horns to allegedly boost soil fertility).

Regardless, it’s a cool idea even if most of the wines are organic and sustainably farmed (and not biodynamic). The Kitchen claims it’s the first restaurant in the nation to cobble together a farm-to-table wine list, which includes hundreds of labels.

Good for The Kitchen.

We hear, often, that alcoholism runs in families; that people with genetic profiles freighted with certain kinds of genes are more likely to become alcoholics than those without the dreaded genes.

But a new study says the urge to drive, while drunk, may also be genetic.

These findings align with previous research that associates this genetic marker with impulsivity and a lower regard for rules.

“Certainly, genetic traits do not mandate that a person drinks heavily or drives after drinking, but the results suggest these issues may be more complicated than being a matter of knowing right and wrong,” Thombs said. “The findings may also be important to explaining the major public safety problem involving persistent DUI offenders – those thousands of persons that keep offending again and again despite being convicted.”

Interesting stuff, and troubling.

Sometimes, with certain wines, I smell lavender – lots of lavender. And when I taste the wine, I experience some sort of Platonic ideal of lavender. I get what lavender should taste like, rather than soap, which is what you’ll taste if you bite into a pretty little lavender blossom.

I recently opened a 2007 Dierberg Vineyards syrah, from California’s Santa Ynez Valley. One swirl in the big glass, one sniff: Lavender bomb. Lavender and blackberry (whenever I smell lavender in wine, I also tend to catch a whiff of blackberry. Weird.)

We downed the wine after a long day of skiing and I-70, and we ate it with homemade pizza.

Perfect.

Antsy for spring? Lavender therapy – via some Dierberg syrah – might help.

I’d wanted to try this hardcore India Pale Ale for more than a year, but never came across it. Until I found it on tap at Boulder’s Most Excellent Bar, the West End Tavern. It was like drinking crocus stamens. This is good. If you like super-bitter – bitter done with finesse, that is; bitter that is more than chewing crocus stamens – you’ll love Pliny the Elder.

Things I cannot resist, even if sometimes I probably should: Hot tubs. Brownies. Espresso. Sparkling wine.

Sparkling wine is a serious weakness. It doesn’t matter where it comes from – slip a flute of the stuff in front of me, or a goblet, and and it’s going down the hatch. Champagne is the most dependably excellent, but the Italians and Spanish know their way around a cellar, and increasingly, so do the Americans, the Chileans, the Australians and New Zealanders and Argentinians.

I’ve had great luck with prosecco over the years, the Italian take on sparkling wine. Sometimes it’s too sweet for my taste, or less effervescent than I prefer, but the price is often right, and I’ve found that for every cloying dud there is a bracing winner.

Here’s a winner: Rustico, from the prosecco house of Nino Franco. The prosecco is grown in the Veneto region of Italy – the northeast part of the country, shaped kind of like a lamb, with a small coastline (Venice) and a lot of mountains, too. The winery sits in the foothills of the alps, and the prosecco tastes much more of mountains than of a coastline. It’s martini-arid, laced with mineral. Where some proseccos flop when it comes to effervescence, not so the Rustico. It’s lively.

You can find it for between $14 and $18.

Sometimes I get hung up on a varietal.

It turns – subtly – from summer to fall and I stop drinking Sauvignon Blanc and switch to Pinot Noir. I’ll drink nothing but pinot – with maybe a little cabernet and zinfandel – for a few months. And then something else strikes my fancy – sometimes, it’s just the cool label – and I indulge.

It happened last weekend with a 2007 Spanish Rioja, and I was so happy for the turn away from the familiar. I’d forgotten how very bright the tempranillo grape can be – lots of fruit, but not jammy like a zinfandel; a bit of wood. A good Rioja – like this Vina Zaco – is such an easy food wine. I had mine with homemade pizza, and it rocked.

It’s the little things. Like coming home from a long trip and wanting something to drink, only you don’t know what that something is. You walk into the kitchen for the first time in days, dragging bags behind you, the house cold and quiet and sad for its prolonged vacancy, your back sore from piloting the minivan for nearly 10 hours, your brain going all tactile, somehow conjuring the feeling of sinking – SINKING – into your bed. Your whole persona radiates sigh, and relief that the whole spectacle is behind you, that you can return to your life and resume just being yourself. And there on the kitchen table: a bottle of wine you forgot about.

THAT’S the something!

It gets even better – much so – when that something isn’t just a nondescript liquid balm, something gently alcoholic and without character that you down like cough syrup just prior to, and maybe during, the SINKING.

When it’s a wine like Franciscan Estates Magnificat – a blend of cabernet, merlot, malbec, and petite verdot – then you might even forget about the bed for a minute. You could sit at the butcher block in the kitchen with a fat glass of the wine, sipping it and nibbling a little bit of cheese and staring out the window into the backyard and unwinding in a more satisfying manner. You don’t submit, collapse, give up; instead you just pause and allow your thoughts to slow down and grow still.

That’s one of the miraculous things about good wine, isn’t it? The juice isn’t merely narcotic – it’s stimulative in a contemplative way.

We all have revelations, right? There was the time, early in your SpongeBob-watching, when you understood, in the instantaneous manner of a conversion, that the show is sublime, brilliant, hallucinogenic, one of the finest things ever broadcast on television. From that moment forward, you were a SB evangelist, a bully about the show.

Remember, too, how you woke up one day, shuffled into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and said: “Oh my God. I’m old.”

Remember?

So some revelations are fun (SpongeBob!), while others are total downers.

Here’s a method for achieving a right jolly revelation.

Buy the pear or peach eau de vie from Peak Spirits, a Hotchkiss (Western Slope), Colorado distillery. I recently wrote a story about how a fistful of peach blossoms are transformed into brandy, and Peak Spirits figured into the piece.

Pour some, maybe an ounce, into a brandy snifter. Cradle the glass in your hand and swirl. Bring your nose to the glass and inhale. Swirl more. Inhale. Do this periodically – swirl, inhale, swirl, inhale. Keep at it for a spell – maybe five or ten minutes.

At the conclusion of an inhale, bring the glass to your lips and tip it back, gently. Do not rush the spirit down your throat. Feel it on your tongue. Permit a sip of oxygen into your mouth while the booze lingers. Inhale, too.

Finally: swallow.

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Chai is easy to like. Easy to loathe, too.

Most people, I would wager, appreciate the mix of spices, the punch of clove, ginger, cinnamon, black pepper, and whatever else that makes chai a beverage variation on a theme of holiday baked goods.

The downside? Chai can be awfully sweet. Have you ever ordered a chai from Starbucks? It’s liquid candy. It’s warm Dr. Pepper, with milk. It’s tooth-achingly, energy-rollercoasteringly (new word!) saccharine, and much the worse for the blitzkrieg of sugars.

My experience with store-bought chai parallels the Starbucks experience – with many of them, it’s like buying a jar of maple syrup (or worse, a squeeze-bottle of Log Cabin) and calling it a beverage. Just add hot milk! I’ll pass.

The people at Third St. Chai in Boulder have not embraced the Log Cabin approach to chai mixes. Sure, their chais contain suger (organic evaporated cane juice) but the sweet-density of their products is relatively modest. Meanwhile, they do not shrink from what should be the very spine of a good chai (and where most commercial chais also fail) – the spices. Their chais don’t offer a whisper of ginger, a trace of cardamom, a spritz of clove, cinnamon, fennel and nutmeg.

No, the spices arrive in the form of a wallop. They strike you, and they stick with you, and because the mix isn’t sickeningly sweet, you can pick out the individual flavors mingling in your warm mug of chai and milk and you are happy, because this is why you want to like chai.

One caution: Play around with proportions. The label calls for equal parts chai and milk, but I preferred three parts milk to one part chai. And you may like three parts chai to milk.

Three plugs: Third St. chai is Fair Trade, and organic. This matters. And it’s local, of course.

Chai weather has finally arrived in Boulder. If you’re craving a mug, check out Third St.

It sounded good, the Mandolin 2009 pinot noir, with talk about its “bright cherry and raspberry fruit,” with “hints of spice, leather and cedar.”

But the wine fell flat, which is the curse of the pinot noir grape. When it’s good, it’s really good. Otherwise, not so much.

It wasn’t an outlandish bottle of wine – just $12. But for the money, a gazillion better options sit there on liquor store shelves, with nice little notes from store employees, notes full of different colored inks and exclamation points and loopy cursive script and underlines.

The failures, like the Mandolin, are part of what makes wine drinking interesting. When you are gunning for bottles $15 or less, you will miss about as many times as you nail a trophy. And when you take that first sip of excellent $12.95 pinot noir, you celebrate.